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Beowulf As Epic

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Beowulf As Epic Oral Tradition, 15/1 (2000): 159-169 Beowulf as Epic Joseph Harris Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been home to two translators of the Kalevala in the twentieth century, and both furnished materials, however brief, for an understanding of how they might have compared the Finnish epic to the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf. (The present brief Canterbridgean contribution to the generic characterization of Beowulf, taking a hint from the heterogeneous genre make-up of the Kalevala, focuses chiefly on a complex narrative structure and its meaning.) The better known of the two translators was my distinguished predecessor, the English professor and philologist Francis Peabody Magoun (1895-1979). In his 1963 translation of the 1849 Kalevala, Magoun’s allusions, still strongly under the spell of the early successes of the oral-formulaic theory, are chiefly to shared reliance on formulaic diction, though he does also point out certain differences in the two epics’ application of this style (1963a:xvii, n. 1; xviii, n. 3). Magoun’s reference to “the Beowulf songs” (xviii, n. 3) in the plural, however, alludes to his belief that different folk variants on the life of the hero can still be discriminated in the epic. By the time of his 1969 translation of the Old Kalevala Magoun seems not too far from the current standard view (xiv): . such a semi-connected, semi-cyclic work as the Kalevala or the received text of the Anglo-Saxon Béowulf, however oral in its genesis, cannot possibly be the product of oral composition. Unlettered singers create in response to an immediate, eagerly waiting audience; they do not compose cyclically, but episodically . it is for that reason that I have been firmly persuaded that the Anglo-Saxon Béowulf, being cyclic in treating more than one episode in the titular hero’s life, must, like the Kalevala, be the work of a lettered person using the verses of traditional singers. Magoun’s narratological terms, especially “cyclical,” are obscurely used, but in his articles it does emerge clearly that he thinks of the received text as containing three songs about Beowulf “soldered” together (his metaphor) by a “concatenator” (1958, 1960, 1963b). Though Magoun’s dissecting, neo- 160 JOSEPH HARRIS Liedertheorie does bring out some real issues that unitarians ought to answer, this mechanical view of poetry separated him from his own students (e.g., Creed 1966) as well as from current scholars of Beowulf, such as John Foley, who think rather in subtler terms of the “oral-derived” product of a real poet, not a concatenator (e.g., Foley 1991). The second Cambridge translator was of a very different sort. A relic of turn-of-the-century Finnish immigration to western Massachusetts, Eino Friberg (1901-95) was a poet; educated to the M.A. level in philosophy at Harvard, he was a man of letters who never held an academic position and who, most remarkably, had been blind since childhood. When I knew him, briefly at the end of his life, he was far gone in a romantic spirituality, which, I believe, can already be heard in the terse and sometimes stark poetry of his translation. His highly oblique reference to Beowulf, which is unnamed but clearly discernible beneath the general wording, is framed as a contrast to the Kalevala (1988:12): The difference is clear, although expressing it may be somewhat more tentative; other Germanic and Scandinavian folklore collections seem to represent reactions to the imposition of Christianity, and the consequent loss of a past way of life—a fond farewell look over the shoulder before taking a place in the historical and literate order of Christendom. The Kalevala, on the other hand, appears at an historical juncture, “a time when history was ripe with destiny” (1988:18), that projects its influence into the future. Friberg would have deplored a word like “concatenation”; to his inner eye “the structural units of the runo-singers were already transformationally related before Lönnrot recorded them” (1988:20)—which may be a poet’s way of referring to a mystic teleological coherence in what I would call the network of discourses, that is, in tradition. The Kalevala is not the only epic that ends with an aeon marked by the coming of a new religion: for one could say the same of the Shahnama and of the less familiar Watunna, collected and compiled in twentieth- century Venezuela (de Civrieux 1980). Such a structure perhaps becomes available to the epic poet whenever history seems to terminate myth. But how exactly to characterize the glance over the shoulder in Beowulf? This has become one of the many controversial themes in the interpretation of the Old English epic. BEOWULF AS EPIC 161 Function, Context and Genre A representative contemporary effort is that of the Freudian James Earl in his recent book Thinking About “Beowulf”(1994). Earl’s first chapter argues that the Anglo-Saxon epic is “an act of cultural mourning” (47): . in Beowulf Christianity appropriates the mythic eschatology of the Germans by historicizing it . eschatology is the poem’s very motivation. The world destroyed at the end of the poem is the heroic world, that pre- Christian world which in many respects had to be renounced by the Anglo-Saxons with the coming of Christianity. The poem is in large part a lament for those losses; and precisely a lament, for in the poem Anglo- Saxon culture seems to be mourning for its lost past. Mourning epitomizes the normal, healthy processes of relinquishing the past and coming to terms with its absence. To the reader of Beowulf it need hardly be argued that a culture can mourn for its past as an individual can. Mourning is in fact commonly experienced collectively. The chapter, under the dramatic title “The Birth and Death of Civilization,” is couched in a rhetorically overheated style and is also overstated: Earl’s confident handling of what he calls the “eschatology of the Germans” is hardly justified, even by the chief witness, Völuspá. Nevertheless, most contemporary interpreters of Beowulf, including me, do now seem inclined to read it as culturally postheroic and retrospective. It does not explicitly announce the coming of a new age in some imagined equivalent of the advent of the King of Karelia in Lönnrot’s Runo 50, but Beowulf’s barrow on Hronesnes does seem to bury a past in anticipation of something new. This interpretative consensus, to the extent that it is a consensus, does not extend to the date, provenance, and political function of the poem. Since 1979 the respectable range of dating possibilities has been extended from, say, 680 well past 800 to around the date of the manuscript, that is about 1000 or a little later.1 Several prominent Beowulfians are now arguing for the tenth century and the court of Æthelstan or another successor of Alfred (e.g., Niles 1993). This date enables them to think in terms of correlating the poem with the founding of the English nation in the wars of Æthelstan and his successors and thus to explain the Danish subject matter politically. I am of an older school. I think the poem has the kind of cultural function we heard of from James Earl, but the political function would have been pre- 1 The “aeon” of 1979 is supplied by a paradigm-shifting conference; see Chase 1981. 162 JOSEPH HARRIS national, perhaps that of the familar speculum regis. I belong among those who think there is a connection between the East Anglian royal family, the Wuffings, and the land of the Geatas, present-day Västergötland; and the East Anglian ship burial at Sutton Hoo, about 625, would seem to furnish a clue to the earliest milieu for the culture reflected by the poem.2 However, unlike Sam Newton, I am inclined to regard the poem as we know it as a product of the Mercian (Middle Anglian) court of Offa the Great (757-97) or of a successor such as Wiglaf (827-40).3 In the context of current Beowulf scholarship, therefore, I belong among those who see the poem as chronologically relatively early, but typologically late in terms of cultural and literary history—as opposed to, for example, Niles (1993), who favors a chronologically late poem that is nevertheless foundational in cultural terms. At least all students of the poem agree in calling it an epic. Or do they? That ambiguous term papers over several disagreements. First, I reserve the word “epic” for relatively long narrative poems of a certain dignity; this allows for a hermeneutically useful contrast with the lay. Thus Hildebrandslied or Atlakvi∂a, for example, as relatively short narrative poems, are lays and not epics. I am not claiming that the Continental and Scandinavian use of “epic” to mean “narrative” is unjustified by custom (in German, for example) and etymology, only that the predominant Anglo- American customary sense (a long narrative poem with certain other features, which, however, are less distinctive than length) allows for useful contrasts that are missing in the non-Anglo-American tradition. In my main effort to present Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry within a consistent literary- historical framework (Harris 1985), I largely follow Andreas Heusler’s lead in constructing an ascending scale of poems from the sophisticated lists of Widsith and Deor, through eulogy, to the classic heroic lay, a native oral genre that we know from the West Germanic fragments, from the “five old poems” of the Poetic Edda, and from such secondary reflections as the Finnsburg Episode in Beowulf (cf. Heusler 1941). The next level of literary magnitude and complexity is the long narrative, the epic.
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